


Narnians Assemble!

by rthstewart



Series: The Narnians Assemble AU [1]
Category: Avengers (Comics), Captain America (2011), Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Incredible Hulk (2008), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-07
Updated: 2012-09-07
Packaged: 2017-11-13 18:27:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/506413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rthstewart/pseuds/rthstewart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Susan and Peggy go shooting; Peter and Steve walk into a bar; Crow, Spider, and Hawk fight the Cold War; Hulk like Lucy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Susan and Peggy go shooting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [intrikate88](https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrikate88/gifts).



> Written for intrikate for the 2012 Narnia Fiction Exchange who asked for a Narnia crossover with the Avengers and reference to my Narnia work. Therefore, the backstory for the World War II part of this borrows lightly from my _Rat and Sword Go To War_ and _The Queen Susan in Tashbaan_. Also, in those stories, King Edmund is strongly identified with crows and he is married during the Golden Age to a banker-accountant.
> 
> Thank you to Snacky for the wonderful beta!
> 
> Minor spoilers for _Captain America: The First Avenger_ ; Marvel Comics; _The Incredible Hulk (2008)_ ; _The Avengers (2012)_ ; Alternative Universe for _The Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle_. Contains references to war crimes and uses period-appropriate terms for race. 
> 
> The Avengers' timing is a little mushy; please refer to notes at the end for (possible) handwaving.  
> 

**Part 1**   
**Mrs. Susan Caspian and Agent Peggy Carter Go Shooting**   
**1943**

It was the second morning since Susan had trekked across the moorland of Inverness-shire to demonstrate to her instructors that she could kill a penned deer with a knife thrust. It was the closest the SOE could come to testing the resolve of an agent to kill. Susan had killed deer with knives and arrows before, so she performed the SOE task well and cleanly. Her SOE instructors didn't know that the Gentle Queen of Narnia had killed humans and other beings before and she well knew the horror of it in no way compared to killing a dumb animal.

Then it was back to Arisaig House and the usual agent guerilla training exercises – running, climbing, more running, fighting, still more running, and blowing things up. And shooting.

Susan listlessly poked her soft egg and forced herself to dip a piece of toast in it. She needed the energy and was due on the shooting range that morning.

"Mrs. Caspian?"

She looked up from her dry toast at the woman who had spoken to her from across the breakfast table and immediately felt only half-dressed.

"Yes, Ma'am?"

The woman who had addressed her was in a smart ATS uniform but without the badges or bars to denote her rank. Special Forces maybe? Susan had never seen her before, which meant she'd arrived last night or even that morning. Yet, even here at the SOE guerrilla tactics training camp, the woman had taken the time to style her hair and put on lipstick. Susan was embarrassed to have not done at least that but she'd gotten out of the habit since coming to Inverness-shire. Running around the highlands blowing things up was very hard on one's coif and everything stuck to lipstick.

"Good morning. I'm Agent Carter. I'm here to evaluate your firearms skills."

_Agent?_   What was an Agent?  And she had been sent to conduct a firearms evaluation? This was peculiar. The instructors had been critical of Susan's shooting (with guns), but neither was she terrible at it and she had acquitted herself very well on the deer kill challenge.

"Of course, Agent Carter." She started to push away her plate but Agent Carter interrupted her.

"Finish eating, Mrs. Caspian. I'll just get a cup of what passes for coffee."

Agent Carter went over to the buffet and nodded hellos to the other instructors. Susan had never even heard of Agent Carter before and wondered if maybe she knew her by reputation under another alias or working name.

Susan quickly ate, dabbed her lips on her napkin and discreetly tried to organize her hair.

Agent Carter returned and sat across from her at the table. She stirred her coffee, took a sip, and grimaced. "Why is it that I must be in New York to have a decent cup of coffee?"

"And you must be in England for a decent cup of tea?"

"Very true." Agent Carter took another sip and her red lipstick left a mark on the white porcelain cup.

"The good coffee was one of the many benefits when I was briefly in our New York offices last year," Susan said. "It was a very stimulating environment."

"So I read from your file," Agent Carter replied.

Susan wondered which file and if Agent Carter knew her real age. The woman was so crisp, it was impossible to tell.

"I was in America on assignment and seldom in the offices," Agent Carter said. "Before that I was working the Wheelwright circuit in Toulouse with Hilaire and the French Resistance. And now I am back here."

Agent Carter did not sound happy about the change but she didn't offer any further explanation and Susan knew not to ask.

ooOOoo

Susan darted into the loo to freshen up before they went out to the shooting range. If Agent Carter had taken the time to look presentable, it was simply poor manners to not do likewise and being out in the middle of the Scottish highlands was no excuse at all.

They met on the front steps of Arisaig House. Strangely, they did not go to the weapons office where the students checked out the firearms they would train on for the day.

"We'll use my guns," Agent Carter said. "I brought them with me and had one of the porters take my case up to the range." They didn't bother with jackets. It was warm enough with trousers and a jumper. Agent Carter did loosen her tie a little.

"There is a bit of a breeze, but you will never have ideal conditions in France, either," Agent Carter said. She jumped down the steps, broke into a jog and Susan followed her down the winding drive and through a narrow gap in the hedge that led to the range.

Agent Carter was very fit and didn't put a foot wrong. The shooting range was over a rise and down in a dell, otherwise empty and lonely, save for the hay bales with the targets tacked on to them and big signs warning everyone to stay away. The local Scots were stoically silent about SOE agents-in-training running about their shire shooting things, blowing things up, and generally creating quite the stir.

Someone had set up a table at the far end from the targets and there was a big silver case there and boxes of ammunition.

Agent Carter took a set of keys from her pocket and opened the three locks on her very large case.

"Goodness!" Susan exclaimed. Inside the case, nestled among rags and straw, were several pistols. Susan recognized the Revolver No. 2, a very sleek Beretta, a Luger, a Colt, and a strange pistol she'd not seen before, that looked like a long tube and little else.

"They are pretty, aren't they?" Agent Carter said, removing the lid and setting it aside. "They are far better than what staff would issue you from the weapons closet and, really, sometimes it's not the flaw in the woman but in the fact that they try to train her up on substandard guns."

"It is an impressive collection," Susan agreed. She also did not recognize all of them, which was itself curious as their training had included extensive firearms instruction and identification.

"Have you used a Beretta or a Luger before?"

"No. I've been working with British makes, mostly, and American."

"I expected as much. No point in practicing with them, then." Agent Carter took the unloaded Beretta and Luger out of the case and set them on the table. "I want to see you dry fire first. Take one and aim it at the target."

Susan reached for the Beretta. It felt cool, compact, and elegant in her hands. She raised her arm up toward the target and…

"Stop."

"Ma'am?" Susan asked, lowering the gun.

"You're taking it in your hands like it's an egg. It's not. It's a gun, it's metal and it's hard and you need to grip it hard, consistently, and the same way, each time. You need to grab it by the barrel, push it into the heel of your hand, and wrap your fingers around the grip, hard, equal pressure, from all fingers."

Agent Carter demonstrated with the Luger. Her movements weren't delicate. They were firm, strong, and confident.

"Like that. Try again."

So Susan set down the gun and picked it up. Again. And again. And again.

After learning to really grab hold of the gun ("It's not going to go off just because you hold it properly, Mrs. Caspian"), they worked on proper sight alignment. Agent Carter stood behind her. Susan raised the gun and Agent Carter put her arms on either side of Susan's body. "Shoulders back, Mrs. Caspian." She pulled on Susan's shoulders and then put her hands on Susan's head. "Head straight, don't dip or tilt, it puts off your aim."

Agent Carter then moved her hands down Susan's outstretched arm. "Arm solid." She squeezed Susan's upper arm almost to the point of wincing and then moved down. "Elbow locked. Locked! Tighten it up, Mrs. Caspian! Nothing limp here! You're an agent with a gun, not a girl on the dance floor! Wrist strong – do not turn your wrist!" She put her hands over Susan's, holding the gun. "Grip hard. Harder!"

Susan's grip on the Beretta was so tight, her arm was almost trembling.

"Much better. I could feel good strength in your arm, probably from your archery." Agent Carter stepped away but was staring at Susan's hand latched on to the gun. "Now, squeeze the trigger… No! Not like that! For God's sake, didn't they give you the fundamentals!?"

It was then another half an hour until Susan was able to move her trigger finger and hold everything else absolutely rigid. She was sweating from the exertion of the minute muscle control required.

Agent Carter again stood behind her and set her hands on Susan's hips. "And now, Mrs. Caspian, I want you to sight the target, settle in your stance, and take three breaths, each larger than the last, and let them out completely."

Breathing was something Susan did well.

"Good, I can tell you're filling your belly properly," Agent Carter murmured behind her, holding Susan's hips between her hands and standing completely still. "It's the swimming, I suppose. Don't nod. Don't talk. Just breathe. Now, fourth breath, deep, deeper, good and hold it, hold it, don't move, don't hesitate. Counting down, three, two, one, fire. Fire. Fire. And relax."

Susan dropped her arm with a huge exhale and Agent Carter removed her hands from around her hips.

"And again."

It was two hours before Agent Carter even let her shoot the loaded Beretta.

Agent Carter stood back, arms folded across her chest and watched as Susan emptied a magazine into the target.

"Reloading is slower on that gun," Agent Carter said as Susan struggled to smoothly remove the magazine. "It's one of the design flaws."

After several rounds with the Beretta, Agent Carter had her switch to the Luger, which after the compact Beretta felt large, heavier, and very powerful.

All that effort with Agent Carter barking orders at her and, still, Susan did not feel her performance was that much better. When Agent Carter finally told her, "Gun down. Let's see how well you did," Susan was prepared for criticism and disappointment. She was pleasantly surprised when they inspected the targets.

"Not perfect, Mrs. Caspian, but much better than I was expecting." She tapped a finger to her lips. "I know you are tired, but humour me, if you would. I'd like to see how you do with the Welrod." Agent Carter removed the gun from the case. "It's a bolt action, noise suppressed, prototype." She had to walk Susan through the mechanics of the thing, as it was all manually operated.

Though not noiseless, it was still far, far quieter than the usual pistol. It was also very difficult to aim and Susan was gritting her teeth in frustration.

"No, that's fine," Agent Carter said, studying Susan's poor handiwork on the target. "You've done as well as most I've seen. It's a prototype. I've never seen anyone hit what they intended at anything more than 25 yards with a Welrod."

"I'm not sure I could hit the broad side of a bomber." Susan was disgusted with her inaccuracy.

"At point blank range, you could, which is its purpose as it was developed as an assassin's weapon," Agent Carter said with a shrug.

"It _is_ quiet."

After the Welrod, Agent Carter produced an even stranger prototype. It was so incredibly light, Susan did not think it could be made of metal, though it felt and looked metallic. It was even quieter than the Welrod and was virtually silent on discharge. When you pushed a button, it shot a strange beam of red light.

"For aid with targeting," Agent Carter said. "Point the light, pull the trigger, and that's where the bullet is supposed to go."

The light beam might target, but the gun could not. It was a very good thing there were no passers-by. Susan couldn't manage to hit even the target at 20 yards; Agent Carter did only slightly better when she tried the gun.

"Don't worry, Mrs. Caspian!" Agent Carter said with a laugh. "I'll just tell Stark to go back to the laboratory. This one is a dud."

They dismantled and carefully cleaned the guns. There were others in the case that had not come out that were even stranger than the prototypes she had tried. Susan wondered if Stark was someone in Churchill's Toy Shop, the group that developed the specialized equipment for the SOE like the rapid firing crossbows and the exploding dung.

"Now, I'm sure you have questions," Agent Carter said, running a rag over the Beretta and returning it to her case. "I have a bottle of whiskey in my room, so let's do our debrief there. It's very difficult to have any privacy in a training facility for spies."

ooOOoo

The shadowy powers that controlled room assignments and one's proximity to the lavatories had allotted Agent Carter a very nice set of very convenient rooms. Susan had assumed they would be sitting on a bed in a narrow cell of a dormitory, but Agent Carter even had her on small sitting area, with a table and an ancient fainting couch covered in crushed green velvet. Access to everything, however, had its drawbacks, including a lot of traffic in the corridors, so Agent Carter was stuffing a towel under the door.

"I'd prefer if we could create some other noise in here with a wireless or phonograph. Everyone here is very nosy, which in spies, I do approve of, and everyone here is also gossipy, which I do not."

"We could hum and dance to the tune. Though jitterbugging is not conducive to conversation," Susan said as she set the glasses on the side table.

"A marvelous idea! Let's make a night of it when we are both back in London!"

"Agent Carter, are you sure about sacrificing your Glenlivet? They might not ever make any more of it." The distillery had shut down once the War started. Perhaps it would revive – perhaps not.

"Absolutely. It is no sacrifice at all. And my first name is Peggy."

"Please call Susan."

They were not to have alcohol or food in the rooms but Peggy didn't concern herself with House rules, so Susan would not, either. Peggy gave the towel under the door a final shove with her foot and joined her on the couch. Susan handed her the drink.

"Cheers."

Susan raised her glass and took a sip. The smoky, rich fifteen-year-old liquor was wonderful on her tongue. "This is lovely. One forgets how good the real thing is."

"It was nice to have access to the rum and tequila in America, but there's nothing to compare to good Scotch whiskey," Peggy said, leaning back in the seat. "There's very little food in France, by the way, but you should be able to enjoy the wine. The French have hidden their best vintages from the Nazis."

"Assuming I am assigned there, of course," Susan replied diplomatically.

"Of course you will!" Peggy said and patted Susan's shoulder. "And do not think that my coming here to train with you reflects a perceived lack of competency, Susan."

Susan appreciated that Peggy had waited until they were well away from the prying eyes and ears of other agents and instructors to say so. "It did occur to me," she admitted.

Peggy shook her head. "We all know that guns are your weakness. Baker Street wanted my assessment. I assure you that even if you _couldn't_ hit the broad side of a bomber, which, by the way, _you can,_ there will be a place for you if you earn it on other skills. And I speak from experience in saying that."

The confidence was heartening. "Thank you, Peggy."

"I didn't explain earlier deliberately as I wanted to see how you managed the uncertainty. Your ability to perform under pressure has been a very consistent and commendable observation during your training and I wanted to see it myself."

"I really should have guessed that." Susan exhaled a small of huff of exasperation. The SOE trainers were brilliantly devious in their methods for testing agents. "So, did I pass?"

"This wasn't a pass-fail, up, or down and out. However, I'm not recommending you for training armed units. Simply put, you don't like guns and that distaste shows. A woman has a hard enough time and being hesitant around guns will make them think you are weak, which you are not."

Susan felt irrationally distressed that she wasn't able to do everything superlatively even if she had come to the same conclusions herself. Susan didn't even want to be out in the camps training the Resistance. She knew her strongest skills would be better deployed elsewhere. She took another sip of her whiskey. With Peggy's support and recommendation, this could lead to a very good assignment.

"You do have a sniper's eye and patience and I think that sort of position, among many others, would suit. I had wondered, too, if the noise at discharge bothered you. That's why I wanted to see you with the Welrod as it is so quiet."

Susan couldn't very well explain that she'd managed accurate shooting with a bow in the noise and stress of battle. She just nodded. "Possibly."

Peggy swirled her drink with a manicured finger tip. "I'm going to recommend they outfit you with a De Lisle. It's a sniper rifle and very quiet. It will play to your strengths and I want you to get proficient in it."

"Thank you, Peggy. I appreciate that support very much." It was very generous and the assertiveness with which she made the promise bespoke her own authority to see it done. The De Lisle was not a standard issue weapon and it was flattering that Peggy would use her influence to get Susan access to one.

"Also, whenever you can practice on your own, I want you to try two-handed, both hands on the revolver, rather than one."

"Really? I've not seen that before."

"Two-handed is becoming faddish in some limited circles. I've met a marksman or three who swear by it." Peggy set down her drink and put out both arms in front of her, with her hands clasped together as if holding a gun.

Susan did the same.

"Yes," Peggy said. "Like that. Up little, though." She put her hand on Susan's outstretched arms and guided them to a higher position.

"You'll need to be discreet about practicing it," Peggy said. "If a man tries it, it's innovative, but if a woman starts shooting two-handed, everyone will think she is weak."

They both lowered their arms and reclaimed the drinks.

Susan nodded. "I understand completely." Narnia had forever altered her thinking in that regard. Among many Birds and Beasts, the females were larger, or had to fend for themselves and their young, lived alone or in matriarchies, or cooperatively hunted alongside the males. "It's not enough to be as good as a man in this business. We have to be better."

Peggy raised her glass and shook her head. "So true. And so absurd. Obviously if you are alone in the field, the Nazi you are aiming at won't care if you shoot one- or two-handed. I want you to practice both, one and two-handed, and right and left.

"I will do that. I so appreciate your time and advice, Peggy. I do feel I learned a great deal."

"I'm a good teacher. You're a good student, Susan. I will stay a few more days to make sure you are on the right course. Let's plan on meeting in London before you are deployed. And within the year, I think you and I will be drinking and dancing in a liberated France."

ooOOoo

**Mrs. Susan Caspian a/k/a Mademoiselle Jeanne-Louise Lambert and Peggy Carter a/k/a Mademoiselle Marguerite Caron Shoot at Bigger Things**   
**June 1944**

 There were over one hundred thousand Allied troops pouring into France over fifty miles of Normandy coast. In the shadow of the Caen Canal Bridge to celebrate the liberation of France and his home and café, Monsieur Gondrée had dug up the bottles of champagne he had buried in the garden 4 years ago when the Nazis marched into Normandy. The café owner was offering glasses of France's finest for any Allied soldier who came to the seized Bridge. He also spared a glass for the lone British spy inserted into the French Resistance to report on the Bridge in the run- up to the invasion.

Against all odds, one of those commandos who had crashed by glider into the Caen Canal Bridge, and captured and held it, was Susan's own brother. And now, job done, Peter's Company was marching out to rejoin their Battalion.

Peter kissed her one more time – not the last time, Susan told herself firmly – shouldered his gun and, with a wave of thanks to Monsieur Gondrée for the champagne, he ran back to the bunker and the rest of his Company.

_Aslan watch over him._

Susan looked around, trying to assess this very limited view of the war zone. She was not certain where she would be best deployed on the day of the largest invasion the world had ever seen. She had helped the Resistance provide the information that now enabled the Allied forces landing on the western flank of the invasion to advance deeper into France over the intact Bridge. The intelligence part of her initial mission was done, and very successfully. She had already killed two snipers but it was too dangerous to continue her hunt. Peter's Company had shelled the water tower she had been climbing and she had been lucky to escape with only a thorough drenching. Should she try to get a message out to her handler in England? Perhaps someone in the landing force had orders for her? The Allies would be marching on toward Paris. Perhaps she should attach herself to one of the advancing columns?

"Jeanne!" a woman's voice called, using Susan's cover name. She turned around.

"I have found you, at last," the woman said, speaking French in a strong Provençal accent. She was wearing a hodgepodge of men's uniforms, British RAF trousers, a stained Italian Army shirt with the sleeves rolled up, an American helmet, and German hobnailed boots. She had a Luger on her belt, a Schmeisser machine gun over her shoulder, and an ammunition pouch slung across her chest.

"Pardon?" Susan began then stared in shocked recognition. _Peggy?!_ "Marguerite!?" Susan was so glad they had shared their covers and working names back in England.

They embraced and kissed on each cheek. Monsieur Gondrée bustled up with two glasses and a bottle of champagne.

"Are you surprised to see me?" Peggy asked.

"I would have been more surprised if you had _not_ been here," Susan replied.

"You know me too well, Jeanne!"

"I know you well enough!" They kissed again and clinked their glasses in a toast to the RAF planes doing barrel rolls overhead.

"I am so glad I found you!" Peggy said. "But why are you sopping wet?"

"The snipers," Susan replied. "There was one on the water tower, which I took care of, but then D Company started shooting at me with their anti-tank gun."

"Idiots," Peggy said with a snort. "Of course those German shells are armour piercing. They shot right through the water tank?"

Susan nodded. "And nearly took me with it."

Madame Gondrée handed her a towel and Susan tried drying herself off; all the camouflage paint Peter was wearing had rubbed off on her and was now dirtying up the towel.

"This is what you get for kissing the soldiers, Jeanne," Peggy said. "They've smeared you with their camouflage paint."

"He was my brother, Marguerite!"

"That is what we all say!" Peggy took the towel. "Here, allow me. You still have some on your face."

"How did you come to be here?" Susan asked, submitting to the brisk rubbing. She had not seen Peggy since they had gone out for dinner and dancing in London before Susan had left for Caen. Peggy had also come to the SOE training facility and schooled her in the De Lisle sniper rifle and they had snuck off to a private range Peggy had access to and practiced the two-handed shooting style. They'd nearly finished the bottle of Glenlivet.

"I parachuted in with the 7th Battalion. We were scattered all over the place. Terrible planning, that. I have orders to collect whoever I can and fly out immediately."

Peggy looked her over critically, nodded with satisfaction, and handed the towel back to Madame Gondrée. "Better. Don't you wish we could dash into a loo and freshen up before we move out?"

"It is a waste of perfectly good lipstick if all you are doing is jumping out of an airplane."

Peggy laughed. "True."

"I was just wondering what I should be doing and here you are! What are the orders?" Susan asked.

"I'm taking a team to Toulouse to find Hilaire."

"That is your old circuit! What needs doing?"

"The 2d Panzer Das Reich division is quartered around Toulouse and Rommel is surely going to order them here, toward the Normandy beaches."

Susan immediately saw the urgency of the orders. The Das Reich tank division had a fearsome reputation.

"The Resistance has orders to harry the advancing tank columns as much as possible between here and Toulouse and they need support – snipers and saboteurs."

Susan hefted her Big Joe crossbow. "I'll need something more powerful against a panzer."

"That's the spirit! I know you like the crossbow and I asked Stark about rigging bolts for anti-tank capability. I also brought a De Lisle for you; Stark's got all our equipment on the plane and other supplies for the Resistance."

"Thank you, Marguerite. That will be very useful." _What a thoughtful gift. Custom-made, armour-piercing, explosive crossbow bolts and a sniper rifle._

"It will be a pleasure to see you use it, Jeanne. And I'd love to watch you stop a tank with crossbow bolt."

With a jerk of her head, Peggy started toward the bunkers where the commanders had set up their temporary base. Susan fell in step with her.

"We need to make a report to Colonel Pine-Coffin or General Gale if we can find one of them," Peggy said. "D Company has a working radio in the trench, so we'll borrow that. Then I'll call up Stark and we'll fly down there immediately."

"Fly?" There were shells the size of jeeps being fired inland at Caen from the big Allied naval guns just offshore.

"Stark is the best civilian pilot in the Allied forces. He'll find us and get us there."

So maybe they would be jumping out of an airplane. _Definitely no lipstick, then._ "We'll need to hurry," Susan said. "Toulouse is, what, maybe four days away?"

"Probably only three. And then the 2d Panzer division will roar down onto the Normandy beaches and wipe out the Allied landing force, just when we're bringing reinforcements ashore."

The invasion could end before it could take hold. They could lose France before they had won her back.

Susan clapped her hand on Peggy's arm. "We may not be able to stop Nazi tanks, but we can certainly slow them down. Let's get down there and start shooting."

"And after that, I think you and I will need to make our way to Paris, Jeanne."

"You did promise me drinking and dancing in a liberated France!"

"It's a date!"

They linked arms, darted around the sandbags, and dashed toward the bunker. There was still a War to win.

ooOOoo

**  
**


	2. Peter Pevensie and Steve Rogers Walk Into A Bar

**Part 2**  
 **Peter Pevensie and Steve Rogers Walk Into A Bar**  
 **June 1944**

London was hot and crowded. There were barrage balloons overhead, sandbags on every corner, spotters on every roof, and green, tan, brown, and blue uniforms everywhere. Most lowly Corporals didn't merit so much as a glance from the old men of the Home Guard, the smart, young WRENs, and the children with toy guns and tin soldiers. But as soon as people saw Peter's Pegasus shoulder flash of the 6th Airborne and the Oxf & Bucks cap badge on his maroon beret, they knew. They assumed (correctly) that he'd been part of the D-Day assault on the Caen bridges and they weren't going to let him go without a kind word.

Usually Peter was gracious about it, accepting the thanks on behalf of the rest of D Company who were still fighting the pitched battles, hedgerow by hedgerow, on the long, slow crawl to reclaim Paris. He should be there. His unit was there. Susan was there, somewhere. Instead, he was here.

He slipped by a shopkeeper offering a congratulatory handshake with a muttered, "Sorry, in a rush, must be off," and pushed on, yanking off his beret and stuffing it in his pocket.

He'd endured months and months of the best training the British Army could provide, and had been fired to a fevered pitched readiness. His company had seen the first action of D-Day in a daring coup de main. They'd crashed into a defended bridge by glider, seized it, intact, in 12 minutes, and had held it against Rommel's Panzer division until relieved. Then D Company had moved out to rejoin the rest of the unit and Peter had barely lasted a week. He'd taken shrapnel to the shoulder outside of Escoville and that was that. He'd been promoted to Corporal, evacuated, admitted to a Surrey hospital, stitched up, discharged to recuperate with mum in London, and now was kicking his heels, waiting to get back into the action, somewhere.

The offer had been _so_ good. He was perfect for it. He knew he was perfect for it and the commanders interviewing him had agreed. He'd gotten in. Colonel Phillips, an American, had said so, and had given him the papers approving the transfer to some special Anglo-American commando unit. The ink from the stamp hadn't even dried on the orders and then Philips called him in again and took them back. Just like that.

_Sorry, soldier, the positions are all filled. Better luck next time._

Peter needed to get by himself and walk off his anger before he hit something, and it wasn't working. Every person he tried to ignore and walk past wanted to congratulate him. He saw a group of WAAFs cross the street, purpose in their step and one of them was putting on a coat of lipstick.

He darted into the nearest pub, wanting a beer and spoiling for a fight. There were plenty of uniforms inside – they were only a few streets away from the War Office where he'd met Phillips. Other soldiers knew that sometimes a man wanted company and sometimes he just wanted to find a dark corner by himself and get pissed.

The barkeep was older and Peter could tell from the limp and the hard look that the man had seen the trenches the last time England had liberated France. The man's eyes fell on the Pegasus flash and the red _Oxf & Bucks_ shoulder title.

"D Company?"

Peter nodded.

"Injured, arm, I'm guessing?" the bartender asked.

"Shoulder."

"It's a trial, lad, to be here when you'd rather be there." The bartender set the pint on the bar. "The whole world owes you a beer, so first one's on me."

"Thank you, sir."

Peter took his drink and pushed through the crowd to a table in the back. He was only a Corporal but the High King knew how to clear a path and, while his rank didn't win him respect, the shoulder decorations did. He captured a table, put a boot up on a stool, put his elbows out, and took a long pull on his beer.

He was half-way through the first pint before he bothered to notice who he was sharing the pub with. At the table across from his there were five men talking low. It was loud so he couldn't hear them. There were several Americans in the group, which usually put his back up. There'd been an American base in Tidworth, near Bulford where his Battalion had trained and the Americans were always strutting around in their nice uniforms and stealing the Tommys' girls with their money, chocolate, and stockings.

These blokes were different. They were rougher looking, had definitely seen action, and, something Peter had never seen before in American units, they were mixed race. There was a Negro and a Jap and, while that wasn't unheard of in British ranks, American units were segregated, so Peter couldn't figure what they were doing here, together.

There was a Brit there too, Army Lieutenant; he was wearing a cap badge that from the angle he was sitting at, Peter thought was special forces, maybe even Popski's Army, which meant explosives and demolition. Having spent ten days killing Germans there, Peter was sure the fourth man in the group was French. The fifth, a big American, was, against all regulation, wearing a bowler hat.

Special Forces, Peter decided, collected for talent, by someone with enough rank to pick who he wanted on his team and didn't care about the U.S Army's segregation policies. It was small for a Commando unit, so maybe they'd had losses or it was something else entirely. From the easy way they were talking, their CO wasn't there.

The Brit Lieutenant saw Peter's notice of the group and gave him a nod which Peter returned.

Peter went back to his beer, pondering the options. He was still in the Airborne – but Glider Corps – maybe he should get his jumps in and qualify as a paratrooper, maybe a Pathfinder. After crash landing gliders in occupied territory and pranging onto Nazi-occupied bridges, going back to regular infantry had been hard, almost boring – though getting shot tended to colour one's view of things.

He'd just finished his pint and was getting up to go to the bar for another when a group of young American fliers swaggered into the pub with girls on their arms and coin in their pockets.

Seeing trouble brewing, half-hoping it would, and knowing where he would stand if it did, Peter sidled up to the table of five he'd noticed earlier. He glanced in the direction of the American fliers at the bar and muttered to the Englishman, "Excuse me, Lieutenant, sir, but a lot of the white Americans don't like sharing British pubs with Negro Americans."

And whatever might have been done to stop the brawl went straight to hell when one of the American fliers shouted something ugly at the Negro and the five commandos all rose as one with a roar, Peter with them.

Peter never threw the first punch in a bar fight, but he could be counted on to throw one of the last. He took an upper cut to the jaw from one of the American Airmen and then got hit in the stomach. He doubled over but pulled himself up and landed a one-two that dropped the man to the floor.

It felt great to let some of his frustration out on the flesh of stupid, bigoted American boys who'd piss in their boots at the first return fire. He'd learned to throw American Army privates and corporals for distance out of Shrewsbury pubs. Peter grabbed an Airman by the belt and, with a shout, the British lieutenant had the door open and Peter launched the floundering flier into the street.

He spun about and saw a beautiful woman in a British ATS uniform land as sweet a punch as he'd ever seen on the Airman who'd started it. The man went down like a sack of dung. Recognizing rank and authority even (and especially when) a woman wore a uniform, Peter grinned at her and saluted.

There was shouting, chairs scraping on floors, and people scrambling for the walls and doors. Peter felt something move behind him. He pivoted, hauling his fist back …

And met a solid wall of American Army Captain who had Peter's wrist in a vise. Peter had fought Nazis, Giants, Hags, Werewolves, and all manner of Fell Beasts; he'd been trained by the Mad Bastard Major John Howard, and by Satyrs and Dryads and Centaurs before that. The Captain's strength that was immobilizing Peter's right arm wasn't Human.

"Easy there, Corporal," the Captain said. Peter was big and tall but the Captain looked right over his shoulder. "Dugan, Falsworth, get the rest of them out of here. Jones, you alright?"

"Fine, Captain!" the Negro, Jones, said. The Frenchman was giving Jones a hand up from the floor.

Peter felt a trickle of blood on his chin. He relaxed his arm and the Captain released him. Peter quickly wiped the blood away. It was just a cut and didn't feel deep. He worked his jaw; it would be sore but wasn't broken or dislocated.

"You waded into a fight that wasn't yours, Corporal," the Captain said. "You should be saving it for the real enemy, not your allies."

The Captain was American, which mean he was under the same segregation that had started the fight. On the other hand, he was obviously the CO and the five mismatched men in the pub were his unit, which meant he didn't give a damn about where they were from or the colour of their skin.

"I don't like racists, sir. And begging your pardon, but a soldier should be able to enjoy a drink with his unit and not hear from his own countryman the same hate we're fighting from Hitler."

The Captain's face twitched into grin. Peter had the feeling he should recognize the man. He seemed familiar. "Why aren't you with your unit, solider?"

"Injured, sir, in France, two weeks ago."

"If that's how you fight injured, what do you do when you're fit, Corporal…"

"Pevensie, sir, and the docs cleared me." He almost said he'd had worse, but Narnia didn't count. "I'm waiting for reassignment."

"Pevensie…" The Captain said, frowning slightly. "You tried to join my Commandos. You interviewed with Colonel Phillips."

Peter swore under his breath. Of all the rotten luck. "Sorry, sir. Yes, sir. I got the orders and then Phillips pulled them. He said you already had a team."

"I do."

Peter looked around and saw it all fit into place with a thud of disappointment. Jones, the Frenchman and the Japanese man were righting the chairs. The English Lieutenant, Farnsworth, and Dugan, the man with the bowler hat, were buying pints and probably laying down some money for the damage, which by the standards of the other fights Peter had been in, wasn't much more than a broken stool. This was the commando team he had been admitted to and then booted from and he'd just waded into a bar brawl with them. At least he'd picked the right side.

"Good men," Peter said. Thinking that sounded more arrogant than he meant, he added, "It was an honour to fight with your team, sir."

"Even in a bar?"

"It's the principle of the thing."

The blood was trickling down his chin again and Peter angrily wiped it away.

"Need something for that?" the Captain asked.

"No, sir, it's nothing."

Jones came up and offered his hand. They shook. "Thank you, Corporal. I appreciate the gesture, though I wish it hadn't been necessary. The Howlers and I would like to buy you a drink."

Peter looked to the Captain for permission. He'd already been rejected once. This was his unit and Peter wasn't going to cross him. There was something really different about the Captain. That strength Peter had felt in him wasn't normal.

The Captain kicked out a chair. "Sit, Pevensie. Join us. If Dugan's buying, best take advantage of it. And then, depending on what my team says, maybe you and I will go visit Colonel Phillips and straighten out your paperwork."

"Sir?" He couldn't believe it. The heavy hand to his shoulder pushing him into the seat decided it. This wasn't an invitation he could or wanted to refuse.

"I already have a team, Pevensie. But there might be room for one more."


	3. Crow, Spider, Hawk and the Cold War

ooOOoo  
**Part 3: Crow, Spider, Hawk and the Cold War**

Time didn't run in the normal way for them. The Crow of Narnia and the Black Widow of the Soviet Union were born in the same year, yet neither of them was the age that appeared on the birth record (real or forged) or passport (real or forged). Edmund spent his first adolescence and young adulthood in Narnia and then repeated it all over again in Spare Oom. Given what was done to her by a long line of overseers, controllers and _apparatchiki_ , Natalia "Natasha" Romanova didn't age normally. This meant that when, after nearly four decades of crossing paths, they did _finally_ actually meet one another, Edmund looked (if he did say so himself) a young 55 but had lived for 70 or more years, and Natasha looked an old 25 but had lived for 55 years.

It was the sort of mathematical calculation that made Edmund miss his Narnian wife, dead over a thousand years, or forty, depending on how the years were counted and when.

The first time Edmund saw Natasha was in January 1944. For that operation, he was Private Harold Linch, bag carrier and secretary to the British-American delegation invited by the Soviets to lend credence to the lie that it was really Nazis and not the Soviets who had murdered over 20,000 Polish officers and intellectuals and buried thousands of them in the Katyn Forest. Assuming his calculations were correct, at the time, Edmund was 16, pretending to be 19 but really about 32; Natasha was 16, pretending to be 19, and if he had seen more than her eyes, she would have looked about 25.

The whole escapade was a whitewash and the stench of the Soviets' lie was greater even than that of the thousands of corpses that were being exhumed, stacked like cordwood, and autopsied by Soviet physicians. The mildewed dead were still in their faded blue-grey Army uniforms; you could see the Polish eagle on the tarnished brass buttons. Edmund was a veteran of Narnian battlefields and had borne witness to the mass graves left by Jadis and the Telmarines; Katyn was far more terrible.

All the Poles had been killed the same way – a bullet through the back of the skull. The Soviet physicians conducting the postmortems swore the bodies had been in the ground for two years – perfectly coinciding with the time in which Germans rather than the Red Army controlled the area. Terrified and intimidated witnesses insisted that the Nazis had killed the Poles in August and September 1941 though the testimony was rote and inconsistent with the physical evidence. Why did so many of the dead wear fur-lined winter coats if they supposedly died in the summer? Why were the few postcards and receipts dating from 1941 that were exhumed seem so much newer than the grubby, yellowed, filthy letters from 1940? Might it have been because the Poles were murdered by Soviets in the early spring of 1940 and not by Nazis in the late summer of 1941 and evidence was manufactured to absolve the Soviets and cast blame on the Nazis?

As the farce wore on, Edmund suspected that the Americans summoned to "investigate" were as coerced as the witnesses. Preserving the ever-shaky Anglo-American alliance with Stalin and the Soviet Union was, in 1944, more important than the truth of who killed 20,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia.

In a cold, stinking tent, Edmund was standing at an autopsy table taking notes in his journal as a British journalist tried to question one of the physicians through the translator. Edmund's own Russian and German were passable enough that he could tell that what the correspondent was asking was not at all what the translator was repeating. The physician was obviously confused.

In the middle of the frustrating exchange, a nurse approached their table. White smocked and masked, she was wearing a bulky coat over an orange apron and luridly red gloves. Her hard, cold eyes peered over the surgical mask and met Edmund's own in a blunt, unblinking challenge. She didn't say anything, but she did not need to do so. The physician took one look at her and dissolved into incoherent stammers. With a satisfied nod, the nurse turned and walked away.

When it was time for the delegation to leave, they all washed their hands, scrapped the foul muck from their boots, and lined up at the edge of camp to make their farewells to their hosts before climbing back into the cars that would return them to the train station. Edmund again saw the nurse among the medical staff, still masked and watching him closely. Luggage changed hands, bodies bumped, and they were herded into the waiting cars. As their train pulled away from the station, Edmund discovered that his journal was gone.

ooOOoo

The second time Edmund saw Natasha was in September 1945. For that operation, he was Lieutenant Merle Just, bag carrier and secretary to the British security detail hurriedly dispatched to Ottawa in the wake of Igor Gouzenko's spectacular defection to Canada. Assuming his calculations were correct, at the time, Edmund was 18, pretending to be 23 but really about 35; Natasha was 18, pretending to be 25, and if he had seen more than her lithe shadow, she would have looked about 25.

The truth of Katyn was victim first to the brutal exigencies of wartime alliances, and then to the Cold War. The Cold War itself probably started when Gouzenko told his wife, Svetlana, he had just decoded a cable that ordered his return to Moscow. Gouzenko knew that meant a welcome home with a GRU, KGB, or NKVD bullet in the skull, just like those 12,000 Poles in Katyn. Svetlana told Gouzenko to open the safe in the Russian Legation in Ottawa, take everything out of it, change the combination, and take the top secret papers straight to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with a plea for asylum.

When the Mounties went to monitor the Gouzenkos' apartment, Edmund joined them. They were all hidden in a park across the street and observed four men from the Soviet embassy come looking for Gouzenko. As the drama unfolded, Edmund couldn't shake the feeling that, as they watched the Soviets, there was someone else watching him, the Mounties, and the Soviet agents stomp about in the apartment building. The harder he looked, the more elusive it was, but he was sure someone had seen it all from the rooftop of a building on the other side of the park.

Gouzenko's defection was sensational news. It was, after all, only September 1945 and the Soviets were still supposed to be allies. After a broadcast was planted that Gouzenko had been spirited away to a safehouse in the Laurentians, the Soviets and the press went haring off in that direction while the debriefing actually occurred hundreds of kilometres in the other direction. They moved Gouzenko to the abandoned Camp X on Lake Ontario; the SOE had trained there during the War.

During a break in the questioning on their second night, Edmund went outside for a cigarette. He met one of the guards, a cautious, loyal, unimaginative Mountie, who was pacing the length of the barbed wire perimeter of the compound.

"What is it?" Edmund asked, reaching for his gun rather than the light.

"I don't know, sir. I thought I saw something on the other side of the fence. It's probably nothing."

Edmund peered out into the darkness and looked for movement independent of the autumn breeze. "There?" he asked quietly, pointing in the direction of a stand of trees. "Something darker than what is around it?"

"Yes, sir. It wasn't there a minute ago." And a minute later, it disappeared.

They doubled the guard.

Weeks later, in civilian clothes, Edmund Pevensie (no longer Lieutenant Merle Just) was embarking on the long journey that would return him to London for the Christmas hols. He was weary and even more worried for if the Soviets had infiltrated the Canadians, surely they had done the same to the Americans and the British.

He picked up the shadow when he got off the bus in Ottawa and couldn't convince himself that he had lost the small, dark shape he saw only in store windows and taxi cab mirrors before he boarded the train to New York. He exhausted hours prowling the train's aisles. He broke into the baggage car and paid a fortune to keep his ideal vantage in the dining car when he did sit. Edmund didn't see anything sinister but he also was certain he was being watched.

When the train pulled into New York, it was the usual crush to leave the cars. Edmund hung back, moving slowly, letting others push past him, and closely watching out the window as people disembarked. Ahead of him in the line, Edmund saw the back of a slim, nimble, red-headed woman. No luggage. Snug black trousers and a trim coat. Her silhouette reminded him of the nurse in Katyn and if she turned around, he thought he would see the same cold, eyes.

It was the self-sufficient professionalism that gave her away. She eschewed the porter's offered hand, jumped down from the train, and expertly melted into the crowd on the platform without succumbing to what Edmund knew was an overwhelming desire to look back and see if your mark had marked you.

Edmund tried to push through the crowd to follow her, but he was hopelessly far behind. And he was already too late. In the taxi to the seaport, he discovered that his briefcase had been expertly cut open and, again, his journals taken.

ooOOoo

The third time Edmund saw (evidence of but didn't actually see) Natasha was in the summer of 1953. For this operation, he was carrying papers from three countries (all identifying him as local variations of Georg Acković), his saddlebags were stuffed with the favoured currency of Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain (chocolate, gum, and cigarettes), and he had a notebook, Romanian lei to buy fodder for his horse, and a small camera hidden in a canteen. Assuming his calculations were correct, at the time, Edmund was 26, pretending to be 26 but really about 43; Natasha was 26, pretending to be 25, and if he had seen her threatening the villagers of Băiţa, she would have looked about 25.

That summer, as Edmund rode through the Carpathians and the no man's land between Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania, he could shut his eyes, hear the bleating of goats, smell the hay, and think he was traveling again in Narnia or Archenland. The 20th century had never come to the area. Crops were still being cut by hand; everything still moved by horse or ox; livestock roamed the dirt roads. The men were toothless, weather stained, and stooped. The women wore the same shapeless, dark skirts and flowered scarves they'd worn for generations. They used crowbars, hoes, and pickaxes to break rock and till the hard, thin soil. The Serbs, Hungarians, and Romanians (and anyone who bothered to meet them and listen to their languages should realize that each was culturally, ethnically, and temperamentally different) had been waiting for the American liberation since the War. But after Yalta, it was the Soviets who came, demanded reparations, and stayed.

He'd been sent to investigate what the West called SovRoms, joint Soviet-Romanian enterprises intended to develop the economy but which their intelligence had indicated were mostly the Soviets bleeding Romania of oil, wood, coal, iron, and natural gas. The one of particular concern was a mining operation Edmund tracked down in Băiţa. It was called _Sovromcuarţ_ – but they weren't mining quartz.

Pulling mere quartz from the Băiţa mine wouldn't have caused the terrible effects he saw in the villagers. At night, under limp trees, Edmund talked with the local people and shared glasses of homemade ţuică – every community of Eastern Europe had its own brand of plum moonshine. He learned that the first workers sent into the mines were political prisoners. They died by the thousands. Then, the locals began working the mine and they, too, began to get sick.

The men and women who entered the mines aged almost overnight. They coughed and complained of headaches and bad stomachs. They were pale, their teeth and hair fell out, and their burns and wounds would not heal. Births had plummeted and the children who were born were sick, maimed, and many died.

The villagers and miners believed they were mining quartz, but quartz would not have caused the wasting illnesses and deformities. The Soviet overseers had sent the Romanians of Băiţa into mines to bring out uranium ore and the Soviets were hauling it way by the ton, north and east, to fuel their atomic program.

In cajoling the truth from drunk witnesses across cultural divides, it was hard to know precisely when the wary Romanians became _even more_ cautious. The warning signs though, were there and were familiar once they began to happen. The villagers stopped sharing their palincă and refused the cigarettes he offered in trade. When he strolled into the village for a bowl of çiorba for supper, they closed their doors and sent him away.

A new element had entered the area and it was very like the fear in Katyn and from Gouzenko and in some of the other places in between and since where he'd tried to document Stalin's atrocities and the reach of Soviet oppression. For the miners' safety and his own, Edmund knew it was time to move on.

Two days later, he stabled the horse in the next village and crept back into Băiţa on foot. After dark, he prowled around the huts, listened at the open windows and doors, and heard the word _păianjen_ spoken in frightened whispers.

_Spider._

He hurried back to where he had kept his horse and was relieved to find the mare still alive.

 There was a note, in English, stuck to the horse's halter: _Fly Crow or die._.

The Spider did not intend to delay him. She did not steal the papers and money he had buried in the manure pile that were necessary for a quick departure. She did take everything else, including his journal.

ooOOoo

 Edmund finally met Natalia "Natasha" Romanova in the winter of 1982. Assuming his calculations were correct, at the time, Edmund was (he thought) a young-looking 55, and didn't have to pretend anymore, though he was really about 70. Natasha was 55, had finally stopped pretending, too, and she looked about 25.

He was Edmund Pevensie again. It had been a relief to leave Crow and all the other aliases, working names, and code names behind. The uncertainty about his true identity, and the sheer number of fake ones, was probably what kept him alive through the 50s and 60s. His pension – and he did wonder if the British intelligence service regretted that he survived long enough to collect it – went further in places other than England. So, for the moment, the former British agent known as Crow had a flat in Trieste.

It was once the Free Territory of Trieste, Zone A, under joint American and British rule until 1954 when the Allies ceded part of Trieste back to Italy and another part of the area to Yugoslavia. One would think superpowers were done with partitioning the world into pieces that suited mapmakers and geopoliticians who could only think in straight lines.

He knew this jumping off point into the Adriatic and the Balkans very well. The city's locale made it a crossroads for trade, business, coffee, spies, and refugees. The latter two meant Edmund could augment his meager pension with a little work on the side that the lax Italian authorities ignored. Ostensibly, he was a printer and bookbinder. Edmund had learned the forger's craft from the very best – the criminals hidden in the basement of the British Embassy to the United States during the War. ( _The_ War, the one that came after the War To End All Wars and not the "conflicts" in Korea and Vietnam). People fleeing from behind the Iron Curtain know that his little shop at the edge of the Città Vecchia would get you very good papers for a very good price.

Edmund had crossed and crossed paths with a lot of people over the years and he was fortunate that none of them seemed inclined to want to kill him now. Though fear of his sister's anger if he were to meet an untimely end had probably stayed the hand of many.

Clint Barton appeared one day, looking like it had been a long succession of planes, trains, boats, and cars to find him. From the dirt, he probably came from the east. Barton grunted a greeting, dropped a bag in the guest bedroom above the shop, shut the door, and Edmund didn't see him for another eighteen hours. When Barton finally reappeared, he walked through the front door of the shop, even though Edmund never saw him leave the upstairs flat. Edmund knew Hawks needed their freedom and so he always left a window open when they stayed.

Barton brought coffees and warm _putiza_ from the bakery.

Edmund closed the store and they went out to the harbour and sat on a bench to watch the barges come in.

"It's an assignment for S.H.I.E.L.D.," Barton said, carefully picking off the last of the sticky crumbs from the paper wrapper and flicking them into the water for the fish. "I heard you've run across her, too."

There could be only one assignment that would send Clint Barton here, for a _her._

"Yes, I have," Edmund replied.

"I've met her before, in the States. A few other places."

A tugboat's horn blasted, startling the gulls who had been hovering about them looking for scraps. Barton stirred the foamy top of his cooling coffee and finished it off.

"I greatly respect her skill," Edmund said. "I am sure she's been stealing my journals since the 40s."

Barton's mouth twitched into a thin smile. "She mentioned that and complained that they were all coded."

"Well, they _are mine_ and I wasn't going to make it easy," Edmund replied. "After she chased me out of Băiţa in '53, I began leaving things for her to find."

"She mentioned that, too," Barton said.

Edmund was suddenly reassessing why Barton had come to see him before setting out to assassinate the Black Widow. "So it might have helped?" he asked cautiously, purposefully injecting a note of hope.

"We've talked a fair amount. She's been asking the right questions. I had some answers."

Barton looked around, seeing as the raptors of Narnia did, and apparently seeing nothing concerning. "Word is that the Crow always believed that no one is a lost cause. She'd heard the same thing. If I'm wrong about you…"

_I'll kill you and go about my business._

"No," Edmund replied calmly. "You aren't wrong. I would be sorry if you had to kill her."

Barton had made a calculated risk in starting here rather than some other far more convenient insertion point into the Soviet Union. Barton knew Edmund's reputation, knew his history with the Black Widow, and his current trade in forging papers that would get a fleeing dissident or defecting spy through Eastern Bloc checkpoints and border crossings.

"I will need a few days and not-too-current pictures of her if you have them."

"That's fine," Barton said. "I've got cash. Haven't told S.H.I.E.L.D. that it wasn't all for the bribes."

"Just to cover my expense is all that is necessary. But if you could get her to return my journals, I'd be grateful."

Within a week, Barton was gone. Edmund did not expect any news. Assuming Romanova didn't kill Barton, and that Barton didn't kill Romanova, and that the KGB or the GRU didn't kill one or both of them, there was no particular reason why they needed to return through Trieste.

He did hold out a forlorn hope of getting his journals back.

Two weeks, then three, passed. Then a month, and then a second. Winters on the Adriatic were usually mild but that December an early, cold Bora blew in. The knock on his door was barely loud enough to be heard over both the wind and the Beatles on his stereo.

Barton and Romanova stumbled in. From the smell of oil, vomit, and fish, the dark rain slickers, and their green faces, he assumed they had come by boat.

They argued about who would dig the bullet out of Clint's upper arm and who would stitch up Natasha's knife wound. As Edmund was the only without injury, he thought he should have the honours and finally prevailed and performed the minor surgeries on both of them. They were starving so Edmund fed them two kilos of pasta and then sent them to the guest room.

He spent the rest of the night at the window with Susan's old Beretta in his lap. Barton and Romanova had thought they'd lost the last of their pursuit in Tirana. Still, they would keep a lookout until Barton hammered out how he was going to get them back both back to the States and explain to S.H.I.E.L.D that he hadn't killed his target but had lured her into defecting.

The wind began to quiet and Edmund thought maybe they might actually see sun in the morning. Behind him, he didn't sense any movement but heard the warning creak of the stair and then a muttered curse in Russian.

"At dawn, I'll go to bed and you or Barton can keep watch," Edmund said to the woman silently creeping toward him. It wasn't comfortable to have the Black Widow at his back, but if she wanted to kill him, she would have tried harder years ago.

There was a soft thunk on the table beside him. "Thank you for returning them," Edmund said, glancing at the stolen notebooks then returning to stare out the window.

"You're welcome," Romanova replied. "Thank you for getting us the papers. You and I are clear now."

Edmund would have done the work for her even without the return of his journals but did not argue the point to the Black Widow. She was leaving a brutal past behind, had a very uncertain future totally dependent on what Barton could negotiate with S.H.I.E.L.D., and she didn't want new obligations going forward. Some people always needed their personal ledgers to balance.

She pulled a chair forward, just behind his, careful to neither expose herself at the window nor block his own view of the street.

"I tried, for years, to understand what you wrote," Romanova said. "It's why I kept stealing them. I was hoping to find a key."

"There is no key. It's all in my head. Though Barton said you were able to decode some of it."

"Yes, some. The word _kavossed,_ " Romanova said. "The word appeared in your entries about Katyn, Ottawa, Băiţa, Yugoslavia, Prague, Poland, Budapest, northern India and Pakistan, Indonesia, Guatemala, Argentina, and Cuba."

"And others," Edmund said. He looked over at her and then returned to watching the street. Romanova was very composed; she wasn't the sort to restlessly fidget, unless it was her cover to do so. He had seeded the journals for her. Now, she logically had questions and had patiently waited a long time for her answers. "In the code, kavossed means many dead people."

" _Galma_ is the Soviet Union and _Jadis_ is Stalin? _Miraz_ is Khrushchev?" she asked.

"Yes. You probably noticed that _kavossed_ frequently appeared in conjunction with those words.

"And the tally marks next to _kavossed_ were how you counted the number of dead people?"

"Yes."

"There were a lot of dead people," she said slowly. "Thousands."

"Tens and hundreds of thousands of dead," Edmund said. "One of my assignments has been to document the atrocities of your former masters, and the other dictators who followed their example."

"And you gave just enough information in your journals for me to be able to decode it and read what you were discovering."

"You aren't blind. Surely you had your doubts about those who created you," Edmund said.

"You assumed I would be weak and would care."

"Feeling compassion is not necessarily weakness," Edmund replied. "As Barton has now demonstrated in pulling you out rather than killing you."

A gust of wind rattled the windows and he sensed Romanova tense next to him. Edmund listened closely but the banging outside was only the loose shutter on the bakery window across the street. It turned quiet again.

"And Hound? There were letters to Hound in the early notebooks but you stopped writing about it."

"Yes," Edmund said. "I wasn't comfortable knowing that anyone was reading them. I stopped writing to her in any journal I thought you might steal."

"Her?" Romanova repeated.

"My dead wife."

"I didn't know you were married. It wasn't in your file."

_No, it wouldn't be._

"It was a long time ago," Edmund told her.

She got up and moved around behind him and shuffled the journals on the table. "There was one letter to Hound that came after, though. You were in the middle of writing it when I stole it from your hotel room in Czechoslovakia, in 1968. I was able to decipher most of that one."

"Could you? At that point, I suppose you had enough material." In fact, the letter tucked into the 1968 journal had not been written to his dead Narnian wife, who had learned the truth contained within that letter during their marriage. It was a message he had written specifically for the Black Widow to find, in the hope that she might some day heed it.

"Here," Romanova said, pulling the letter out of the journal on top. Even in the dark, Edmund could see that the letter was well-creased and thumbed. "You wrote to her that you had done something terrible, once."

"Yes. And I received a great act of mercy in return. Every day since then has been a calling to show others the same hope for forgiveness that I received, even when it is not deserved."

"That's very naïve, Crow."

"I call it grace, Black Widow. Everyone deserves a second chance."

 


	4. Hulk like Lucy

ooOOoo  
Bruce isn't sure when he first notices the announcement. Later, he'll recognize that that's just how S.H.I.E.L.D. does things. He has to give them credit – it's hard to fool him and it all seemed so innocuous – no, it was innocuous, he never saw it coming.

Knowing what he does now, what he learned because of those notices, he would not have stopped it either and would not have done a thing differently.

There isn't much in Bella Coola, British Columbia, population 600, and there's even less in his remote cabin. He misses living on the grid and a lightning fast Internet connection. He misses _Mythbusters_ and _Top Chef,_ misses Reds baseball, and misses the Portuguese _feijoada_ and the food trucks that would come to the bottling plant in Rochina. He misses being in a laboratory with bright students and brilliant post-docs, and colleagues with vacant looks, astounding ideas, and Tootsie Pops, and all the sonic screwdrivers in lab coat pockets. He misses clean rooms, bright lights, properly calibrated equipment, and safety goggles. On the other hand, in Bella Coola, there are no university administrators, pharmaceutical sales reps, and nosy oversight committees concerned about following rules for human subject research.

The isolation is good for keeping the Other Guy in check and keeping Them away from both of Them. He's not going to risk the conveniences that could come with a satellite phone given what could come to him from the other end. So Bruce contents himself with a relaxing 20 km roundtrip jog into town twice a week to pick up his mail – the Vancouver newspapers, physics journals, yoga magazines, _Mother Jones,_ , _Rolling Stone,_ and _Bon Appétit._

Wedged between _Applied Physics Today_ and the _Journal of Spiritual Awakening_ he finds a flyer, _This Month at the University of BC, Vancouver Campus._

Bruce turns the flyer over, and his eyes skip over the photography exhibit on carnivores, the Women in Microeconomics symposium, and the annual Robot Building Contest. He stops when he sees her, a fuzzy black and white photograph and bio blurb copied and pasted from the thousand that have preceded it. He recognizes her name in the vague way of colleagues discussing who did not earn Nobel Prizes that year and that Dr. Lucy Pevensie was always on a short list for Peace.

He didn't know she was so old.

_Answering Your Call – How To Be Valiant In Every Day Life. Jointly sponsored by the Faculties of Arts and Medicine. Join world-renowned humanitarian Doctor Lucy Pevensie for an evening discussion about aiding the whole person. Dr. Pevensie comes to us having just returned from her work with a network of clinics in Rwanda and Zimbabwe providing HIV/AIDS treatment and support for women and children. Her special focus has been psychosocial counseling to populations traumatized by political violence and natural disasters. She is currently assisting local healthcare professionals in meeting the unique patient needs in India-administered Kashmir and vulnerable tsunami-affected communities in Aceh Province, Indonesia._

_Doctor Pevensie with her brother Edmund Pevensie are noted also for their work investigating mass grave sites and disappearances, with significant work in Poland, Romania, Argentina, Chile, and Sri Lanka._

Bruce thought he tossed it in the trash but somehow the flyer gets wedged into the _Mother Jones_ and he brings it home. Maybe there were two flyers.

He sees a poster at the grocery store four days later and there's an article about Doctor Pevensie in the Vancouver paper the day after that. It's not very well-written, obviously picked up from wire services and outdated Wikipedia entries, but even that makes for a compelling story. Doctor Pevensie has been walking the walk for a very long time. The article dates her political awakening to 1942 when she was making noise about the Holocaust before it was even called a Holocaust.

The weather is good (for British Columbia). Then he notices the price of gas falls. It's a long drive, but he's got his iPod – he rocks to the hard and sings off key to the rest. He has _Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows_ Book on Tape (though they aren't tapes anymore) and 12 hours in his hybrid isn't going to be a problem and he can even charge it up in Vancouver.

The Other Guy has to come along but he's not been out in 113 days, 14 hours, 42 minutes, 25 seconds. Bruce wishes more than anything he could leave him behind, but it doesn't work that way. On the safe side (and Bruce always plays it safe where the care and feeding of the Other Guy are concerned), he uses a pay phone (they are hard to find these days) and makes a reservation at a camp site on the Bay.

The drive is relaxing and he alternates between Glam Rock of the 70s (for the irony), Best of the 80s Top 40 (for the singing along) and classic rock which he thinks the Other Guy likes. They both seem to agree on Zeppelin, the Stones, and Pink Floyd ("all in all you're just another brick in the … SMASH"). Bruce remembers a vegetarian place near the university that does a great spicy mock duck. He's completely relaxed and the Other Guy isn't making any noise at all.

Again, later, Bruce will realize that S.H.I.E.L.D. is greasing his wheels and that's why there's no wait anywhere, no one speaks to him unless spoken to, and there's a free parking space a two block walk to the auditorium where Doctor Pevensie is speaking. Lucy will say that you don't have to like them to take advantage of what they offer, and so it is.

The auditorium isn't as crowded as he would have expected it to be and he takes a seat on the aisle, drinking in the pleasure of being in an academic environment again. Doctor Pevensie is walking up and down the aisles of the amphitheater, shaking hands and hugging people. The article made him think she was about 75, give or take. She's wearing khakis and rolled up sleeves, boots that have seen a lot of wear and a bright scarf of red and gold around her neck. Her face is lined and tanned and her gray hair close cropped but something really bright seems to shine from her. Everyone seems to follow her, in the way that moths are attracted to lights in the dark.

She turns around and Bruce has that sense she's looking for someone as she scans the filling auditorium.

Their eyes meet and hers widen. He freezes in his chair, feeling panic, worried for a moment that the Other Guy is surging out to take over. Then he thinks he's got it all wrong because he'd swear the Other Guy is smiling back, gap toothed and crookedly, at Doctor Lucy Pevensie. She strides up the aisle, taking two steps at a time, holding out a hand.

He doesn't want to take it, but she's already seized his and is pumping it.

"Thank you so much for coming," she says. "I'm Lucy, obviously."

"Bruce Banner," he manages.

"It is lovely to meet you, Bruce." She releases his hand, reaches out, and rests her palm on his chest. "And your friend?"

"He's…" He stammers and gulps. What just happened? "Not a friend." He stares down at her hand resting over his heart, wondering what he would see if he could see gamma radiation flowing from him to her over the bridge of her arm. "The Other Guy," he whispers. "Hulk."

"Well that does not do at all for me." She purses her lips in a frown. "You remind me a little of a Giant I once knew."

She's not talking to him, that is Bruce, but to the Other Guy locked inside him. Lucy rattles on. "He was prone to fits, which is certainly to be expected when one's understanding is not strong and everything moves far too fast to catch up and bad people are always trying to use you for their own corrupt purposes. He was a good friend to me. Might I call you Stormybuffin?"

Bruce doesn't say anything. Doctor Lucy Pevensie is obviously not sane on any parameter of the DSM and she's touching him as if they were old friends, and not only has she somehow seen the Hulk within him, she's naming him like a pet gerbil but who was a Giant? Except the Other Guy seems perfectly content with all this and Bruce senses that if he tried to sneak out now, the Other Guy would put up a fight.

Doctor Pevensie kisses him on the cheek. "You both will join me after? For prayer?"

And then she flits away.

He doesn't recall much of the talk. Doctor Pevensie doesn't speak in intellectual terms about data and facts, figures, budgets, fundraising goals, and costs of patented prescription drugs that are interfering with treatment options in the places she serves. She speaks of embracing and healing the whole person, and of security in mind and body being a fundamental human right. She tells stories. She makes people laugh. She makes them cry. She inspires.

There's wild applause and he tries to slink away but Doctor Pevensie gives a warm smile and a steely look and it's like demented love at first sight for the Other Guy.

oOOoo  
Bruce tries to convince her that he should just go back to his reserved campground. He shouldn't let her link her arm in his and walk through the parks around the UBC campus. It's late, his car will be towed, mutant commandos will swoop in, someone will try to rob them and hell will open up.

"Lucy," she says firmly when he keeps calling her Doctor Pevensie. "Bruce, you must call me Lucy." She complains that it's too dark and late to go to Wreck Beach.

"That's the nude beach, Lucy," he replies laughing at her joke.

"I know! It would be marvelous, wouldn't it?"

So, not a joke. Given that the Other Guy will grow right out of and rip to pieces whatever clothes he's wearing, leaving him naked when he changes back, nudity is something Bruce has had to become more accustomed to – not a normal state for a physicist. Still, he can't comprehend going all natural with a 75 year old woman he met barely three hours ago.

At her hotel, he wants to take the stairs, not the elevator, to her suite. The Other Guy isn't good in small, closed in spaces.

"Oh nonsense!" Lucy says, tapping his chest again. "You'll be fine, won't you Stormybuffin?"

Bruce has to admit that he is fretting more than the Other Guy. At least they are only going to the third floor.

In her hotel room, Lucy tosses her backpack on a chair and flops down on the floor. Moving a little stiffly, she pulls off her boots and shoves them aside. "Sit!" she commands. "Wherever you like. You need to meditate and I need to pray. We'll talk after."

Lucy doesn't say another word for the next 45 minutes. He is rattled yet still rational enough to know meditation would help. With the strange environment and the unsettling person, he should be simmering with dangerous impatience. But it's quiet in the hotel room and Lucy is already leaning against the wall, eyes closed, murmuring to herself. What did housekeeping use to give the room the wonderful smell?

Bruce joins her on the floor, takes a deep breath, and begins his mantra.

It's so peaceful and he relaxes so quickly, Bruce nearly falls asleep. He rouses when he senses Lucy moving quietly about the room.

He lets out the breath, unfolds his legs, and stretches his neck. He feels great.

She hands him a glass of water and sets out bags of nuts and fruit on the floor that are from a local health food store. "I have some Pop Tarts," she says, sounding a little defensive. "Brown sugar cinnamon. I always take a trip south of the border when I'm in Canada and stock up."

"Thanks, but this is fine." Brown sugar cinnamon Pop Tarts are evidently a personal favorite of Lucy's, and he doesn't want to deplete her stash; he knows how he'd feel about sharing Tootsie Pops – the Other Guy always wants to crunch down to the chewy center right away so they are a good exercise in compromise and control.

"How did you know?" he asks.

"About Stormybuffin?" Lucy shrugs and sits again on the floor. "I spent ten years here with a spiritual guide, of sorts. I'm very intuitive. I've been a healer all my life. And I'm very familiar with that phenomenon of something that is larger on the inside than it appears from the outside. I see things others don't, Bruce."

"Things larger on the inside than on the outside violate the law of the conservation of mass," Bruce replies. He's never been able to figure out how the huge Other Guy comes out his small self. It shouldn't happen.

She laughs. "I suppose it is magic, then."

"There's nothing magical about the Other Guy," he replies bitterly. "He's a monster. It's very dangerous for anyone to be close to me, including you."

"That's not what Aslan just told me," Lucy says. She slowly unwinds the bright scarf around her neck and Bruce sees it had red and gold lions on it. Lucy sets it reverently aside and pops almonds in her mouth.

"Who is Aslan?" Bruce asks sharply. Is it an acronym for something he needs to run from? Should he start running now?

"I call him Aslan. I'm not sure what you call him."

"When did you talk to him?" She'd not made any phone calls. He'd not seen anyone suspicious approach her.

"Aslan and I talked while I was praying."

"Aslan is in your head?" Now Bruce wonders, not about government conspiracies and super soldiers, but about dissociative personality disorders and schizophrenia. Except Lucy seems to be one of the saner people he has ever met.

"Of a sort, yes. As I said, I don't know what you call him and he has many names in many worlds. I met him first as Aslan and that is who he will always be to me." The cellophane package holding the dried nuts and fruit makes a crackling sound as she digs into it. "I appreciate your worry, Bruce, and I thank you for it. However, I have nothing to fear from you or Stormybuffin. When Aslan calls me home, it shall not be at your hand."

She offers him some grapes. The brown paper they were wrapped in has turned soggy but the fruit is very sweet tasting.

Was Lucy talking about God? Or a god? He doesn't know what to make of it. The only god Bruce knows is the ridiculously-named god particle that Higgs proposed in 1964 and he feels a brief pang for the prospect of working at CERN with brilliant colleagues on world-changing revelations of science instead of meditating in the wild with only the Other Guy for company.

"Aslan has told you when you will die?" If Aslan could tell him how to kill the monster within and die, Bruce would have Lucy Pevensie baptize him into her religion right there in room 343 of the Sheraton suites.

"When my work is done, I shall die, and not before," Lucy says with great confidence. "As my work is not done, I shall not be dying today or anytime soon. Which brings me to you. I want you to come with me."

"Where?"

"Well anywhere is a start, but how about Kolkata. I'm affiliated with a clinic there. Wonderful staff. They need another doctor."

"I thought you meant out to dinner or to Wrecks Beach?!"

"Well, maybe them, too. But Kolkata." Lucy pauses, looks a little vacant. Bruce wonders if Aslan, whoever Aslan is, it talking to her

"Yes," Lucy says, sounding decided. "Kolkata."

"Me?" he squeaks, now seeing she's wholly serious. "Pack up and go? India? Just like that? To Kolkata?"

"Yes! It would be so good for you, to be helping people. You've been a hermit long enough and you and Stormybuffin have things under control. The nurses at the clinic are lovely and are completely overwhelmed. The needs are so great, HIV/AIDS, TB, parasitic infection, cholera. There is so much you could do there."

He wonders where she fits on the DSM – probably some sort of delusional disorder not otherwise specified. "Lucy, me and the Other Guy in a crowded, urban, Indian city could not be good for anyone. I should not be seeking out things that make me angry."

Lucy snorts. "Oh Bruce, I do hate to quote trite American bumper stickers, but if you aren't angry at what has been done to our world and the poorest, most vulnerable people in it, you haven't been paying attention."

"You don't want to make me angry," Bruce repeats. "That's when the Other Guy comes out."

"I don't doubt that, Bruce. But you and Stormybuffin would benefit from learning how anger is not always the enemy. It can also be a powerful motivator. I am angry all the time."

"It's different, Lucy. The last time I was truly angry, the Other Guy and I broke part of New York City."

"In a place like Kolkata, you won't let that happen."

He has no idea where her confidence comes from. "How can you know that?" he demands.

"Bruce, in Kolkata, you will be among people who have far more reason to be angry than you do. I think a place like that is perfect because you and Stormybuffin know that if you lose control, you will hurt the people you are trying to help and destroy whatever little they do have."

She leans back, looking satisfied, certain she's carried the argument. "Yes, I think Kolkata is perfect. Good yoga instruction, too."

Bruce feels the anger rise up, but it's his own, not that of the Other Guy. Lucy shifts, digs into her pocket, and pulls out that very old fashioned British thing known as a handkerchief. She presses it into his hands.

"Don't worry, it's clean," she says. "I gave one to a very good, respectable Giant I knew a long time ago. I'd like you and Stormybuffin to have one, too." She sniffs and looks sad. Neither Bruce nor the Other Guy wants to see Lucy sad.

He stares at the delicate little white square and imagines it torn to bits in a big, green hand. "Lucy, there are some very important people who are very interested in me, and if they can't control me, they would certainly try to kill me."

She shakes her head. "As I see it, it is good if they are afraid of you. We'll sail right through airport security."

"You are willing to travel with me and the Other Guy in a pressurized cabin at 30,000 feet?"

"That means the flight will be on time! They will probably upgrade us to first class!"

Bruce learns that in the abused, poor, and exploited places in the world, Lucy Pevensie is angry all the time. Sometimes, that isn't a bad thing.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Marvel timeline notes:**  
>  The Marvel wiki identifies 1928 as the approximate year of the Black Widow's birth and states she ages very slowly. The year she defects is unclear and I can't reconcile it with Hawkeye's apparent age in _The Avengers_ particularly since "defection" usually denotes the Cold War era before the Berlin Wall comes down in November 1989.  
>  _Captain America: The First Avenger_ places Steve and Peggy in Italy during the USO tour though the Allies didn't invade Italy until September 1943. The Marvel wiki says that Peggy Carter was in the French Resistance and that Captain Steve Rogers is hurled into the North Atlantic in 1945 in a confrontation with Baron Zemo.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Susan And Peggy Go Shooting (Again)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2404067) by [rthstewart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rthstewart/pseuds/rthstewart)
  * [Kavossed](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3451994) by [RuanChunXian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RuanChunXian/pseuds/RuanChunXian)




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